In the second term of the Modi government, there were four ministers – all Ministers of State: Nisith Pramanik (Home), John Barla (Minority Affairs), Subhas Sarkar (Education), and Shantanu Thakur.

While Barla did not contest the Lok Sabha elections, Pramanik and Sarkar lost from Cooch Behar and Bankura, respectively. As compared to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, when the BJP had won 18 of the total 42 seats, the party’s tally dropped to 12 this time.

Shantanu Thakur, 41, MoS

An influential leader of the Matua community, Thakur heads the All India Matua Mahasangha, a religious sect of the Scheduled Caste Namasudra community, which migrated from Bangladesh — first during the 1947 Partition, and then after the 1971 Bangladesh War. The community has a presence across six Lok Sabha constituencies of West Bengal — North 24 Parganas, South 24 Parganas, Nadia, Cooch Behar and Purba Bardhaman.

Shantanu belongs to the Thakur family, which heads the Matua sect and has been involved in politics. Shantanu’s father, Manjul Krishna Thakur, was a minister in the TMC government in West Bengal. In 2014, Manjul joined the BJP following the death of his elder brother, Kapil Krishna Thakur, a TMC MP. Amid a feud in the Thakur family over the successor in 2019, Shantanu joined the BJP in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections and won from Bangaon. As he won the succession battle to head the Matua Mahasangha, he was made MoS minister in the Modi government in July 2021 after the BJP failed to garner the votes of the community in the West Bengal Assembly polls.

Shantanu also accompanied PM Modi to Bangladesh during his last visit to Dhaka that year. As the BJP pushed for a new citizenship law (Citizenship Amendment or (CAA)) eyeing the votes of Matuas and refugees, it failed win the support of the community in the 2021 Assembly polls.

In this Lok Sabha election too, BJP retained two and lost one of the six Matua-dominated seats — Cooch Behar, Ranaghat, Bangaon, Krishnanagar, Barasat and Bardhman Purba.

While BJP minister Nisith Praminik lost to TMC in Cooch Behar, one the six Matua-dominated seats, the party won from Bangaon, where Santanu Thakur defeated TMC’s Biswajit Das by polling 48.19 per cent of the votes — a marginal dip from the 48.85 per cent of the votes he had polled in the previous 2019 Lok Sabha election.

Lok Sabha Election Results 2024: Full list of winners